My Interaction With The U.K. Customs Lady

I step up to the podium behind which a woman is sitting.

Me: Hello.

Lady silently stares, so I handed her my passport and card that I had filled out regarding my "business" in England.

Lady: How long will you be staying in the U.K.?

Me: Ten days. [(I didn't actually know exactly, but I figured it would sound better to give an exact amount of time rather than to sound ambiguous.)]

Lady: Where will you be staying while you are here?

Me: University of Gloucestershire. I'll be visiting friends there.

Lady: May I see your return tickets home please?

Me: I'm sorry?

Lady: May I see your return tickets please?

Me: Oh, I don't have them, yet.

Lady: You don't have them?

Me: No. Not yet.

Lady: So you bought a one-way ticket here?

Me: Well, I flew here from Thailand, I've been in Thailand for the past few months.

Lady: I see, and what were you doing in Thailand?

Me: I was- I'm a student, and I've been studying abroad there.

Lady: And you'll be staying at the University of...

Me: Gloucestershire. I have friends who are studying there, friends from my university in America. They're also studying abroad.

There is a pause, while Lady makes no attempts to hide her sheer astonishment. She shuffles through my passport (though I'm not sure why, there's not much to see in it that she hasn't already examined).

Lady: How much money do you have?

Me: ...You mean how much cash do I have on me?

Lady: Yes.

Me: Um, not...very much...

Lady: Alright, so how do you plan to get anywhere, or to meet up with anyone, you don't have a cell phone, and you don't have any money--

Me: I have a credit card, or, a debit card.

Lady: How do you plan to purchase your plane ticket?

Me: Online?

Lady: I mean if you don't have any money?

Me: I have a credit card...

Lady: Is it a friend you're visiting, or a boyfriend?

Me: My boyfriend and a few of my friends are at the University of Gloucestershire. I am visiting all of them.

Lady hands me my passport, silently, which I take as a sign that I'm free to enter her kingdom.

So I found something fun to do!  Today I am leaving Chiang Mai, and tomorrow I will fly from Bangkok to London.  I'll be in England for the next week or two, visiting Dan and other friends who are there.  From England, I will fly back to America, sometime in early May.  

A Banal Update - Now Complete with Pictures!

My apologies for the prolonged blogging absence. For the past month I have had limited internet access, and by the end of this post you will know why.

A couple days before we left our host families, we had a Farewell 

Banquet for the students, families, 

and others who gave their time to our program's two months in Chiang Mai.  Here is the only picture I have of my entire host family. It portrays the awkwardness of our coexistence quite well, I think.

On March 14, I moved all of my things out of my host family's house, and left with everyone in our program for what we have taken to calling "Travel Week."  We took a large charter bus to five different cities in six days.

Many of our daylight hours of the week were spent

 on said bus, and each night we crashed into a new hotel room.

During Travel Week, we rode bicycles through parks and temple grounds in Sukhothai, visited antique museums in Pitsanulok, teased monkeys in Lopburi, traversed ancient temple ruins and sang karaoke on a boat in Ayuthaya, and gawked at the millions of tourists at the Grand Palace in Bangkok.

While many in the group were dreading the heat and overwhelming nature of Bangkok, it was a bit of a Mecca for me throughout the preceding week. Gavin and I passed the time by singing Disney and Britney Spears songs loudly, as we eagerly anticipated the arrival of our beloved visitors, whose planes would land at the Bangkok International Airport. Dan got in safely at midnight Wednesday, and a few hours later, Gavin, Lizzy, Dan, and I were off to Ko Phi Phi!

The island itself was quite beautiful, especially around the edges (I think those parts are commonly referred to as "beaches"). The inner part of the island is crowded by post-tsunami-reconstruction and young Europeans, Australians, and North Americans, ready to party like it's 1999.

After a wonderful week in a beautiful place that, incidentally, felt nothing like Thailand as I have known it because the Thai to tourist ratio was something like 1:12, we returned to the Bangkok airport, this time a little less excited. Dan boarded his flight back to England, and after lots of waiting and mourning, I took a quick flight to Chiang Mai, where I interneted and showered and went to bed at 7pm. I was happy to be awakened a couple times by friends who had returned from their own island excursions. The next day (March 28) we all left Chiang Mai for the our month-long stay in the Karen Hill Tribe Village, in a remote, mountainous area

 of northern Thailand.

The Village, as we call it, as if there is only one, is quite the experience. Each day we eat breakfast (usually pancakes or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches-- I'm not kidding), and then waste time, reading or sitting around, until lunch (usually vegetables and rice). In the afternoons sometimes we pile into a "refugee truck" (I call it this because it looks like the trucks that bring in the Burmese refugees daily who work in Chiang Mai) to travel about 4 miles down the dirt road to a lake, where we can swim. After swimming, we waste more time, sometimes we do this by counting down the minutes until it is time to eat dinner. Dinner is also usually rice and vegetables, and fruit for dessert. After dinner we waste time until it is a reasonable hour to go to sleep (anytime from 8-10:30pm... yes, one night, we stayed up till 10:30, it was crazehh). 

I was in The Village with the group for the first two weeks of the experience.  This was the house where I stayed while I was there.  I stayed here with four other girls from our program, and the five of us now have a morphed manner of speaking, so that one would likely not be able to differentiate one of us from another simply by hearing us speak.  House was the best thing about my time in The Village.  Since I am not taking the academic course that is offered (I don't need the credit), I felt largely purposeless from day to day, so I decided to hang around Chiang Mai for a few days and see if I can find anything fun to do. Thus far I've filled my time here with lots of internet things including emailing and talking to friends and family from home.

I am ready to go home, as I feel like I have accomplished whatever it was that I came to Thailand to do.  In three weeks I will be back in America.  Ready???